Mega Man II (Game Boy) -- Title, Clash Man
Okay, so I haven't QUITE kicked the habit just yet, but I promise this will be a quick side trip. I promise after this, I'll be good and lay off the Mega-controlled substances. We all know I'm in deep enough with audiovisual trips on my other ongoing series, for however long I can sustain that one.
I mentioned quite publicly when I began the previous little "project" that it was Mega Man X which led directly to my descent into madness as a bona fide berserk blue bomber basket case... well, I spoke also of "limited experiences" with the classic series prior to that, indicating that there was a time when I wasn't quite so committed to the cause (or the madhouse) as now. This game is one of the primary demons that plagued me so and started me along the wrong path for a time.
Don't get me wrong, I don't actually dislike this game, far from it actually... it just took me awhile to appreciate the various charms of the Mega Man way of doing things, and I certainly wouldn't suggest that one get their start with the series via its original portable outings.
The facts still remain, however. This was my actual first ever Mega Man game.
The one thing that made the biggest impression on me back then besides "I don't like this game" was the music, even as patently "Game Boy" and even more limited than the NES as it was.
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Mega Man has had the tradition of releasing a series in parallel of Game Boy semi-ports that would seem to be caught between the resources of two different NES games... generally taking four Robot Masters and scaled-down facsimiles of their stages from one game and four more from the NEXT game in the home console progression.
In Japan, to avoid the confusion of having identically-named games on different platforms with different sets of challenges contained therein, this series would be known as "Rockman World," thus, this game is actually "Mega Man World 2" and not simply a second "Mega Man 2"...only named according to a convention of using Roman numerals instead of Arabic ...confused yet?!
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For the record, I won't be doing as I did with Mega Man X, using only the buster on Robot Masters, because... well, this game's a little different, and there are a number of reasons why I'm okay with that.
Obviously there's a slight problem of size and scale, making these rather ambitious attempts to recreate the magic for a smaller world, and this becomes most apparent in the boss fights.
The patterns are for the most part the same as they were before the Robot Masters got recycled... but the problem is that the boss rooms are TINY. So the full extent of the battles are similarly cut down to a quick and dirty rumble.
The reason why I use this as an "excuse" for my decision to abandon all ethos with regard to "everybody should be able to be fought first, and I'll prove it!" is because there do exist "real" versions of these Robot Masters out there to do battle with. That is, I fully intend to fight them "for real" one of these days in their full console-powered glory.
There's also the fact that this is just a mini-project of sorts, simply paying proper homage to my roots on a whim... and you'll be crushed to know this, but I never played and don't own another game in this subseries (hence also starting and ending with "II"), because by the time I became interested in Classic series Mega Man, I had discovered the wonders of the console versions instead.
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For all my talk of the game being made "smaller" for its new pocket-sized portable home, I wonder if you expected the stage select screen to shrink as well.. there's only four choices here! Well, we'll see what's up with that a little later, I guess...
An embarrassing little factoid from my childhood, I thought this was a case of choosing which "man" you wanted to play as, not against. I never reached one to fight him for the longest time, so I was merely left to wonder why they all looked and played the same. (Silly kids!)
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Clash Man Stage
Yes, you read that right...this game actually refers to this particular Robot Master as "Clash" Man, not Crash Man as he was named in his NES appearance. Oh, you guys at Capcom, USA!
Anyway, this is as good a case as any to begin with, as it's a fair demonstration of the degree to which it simultaneously adheres to and deviates from the original Crash Man stage... and also how the reduction in scale manages to "break" certain elements of it, like the path-following platforms rooms.
Oh, it also forces us to note that Mega Man has taken his sliding prowess from Mega Man 3 (since, as you might have gathered from my earlier comments, some Mega Man 3 Robot Masters will be showing up later).
"Clash" Man fights a pretty basic battle... he paces across the room and will only act in response to your attacks, whereupon he'll jump and shoot a "Clash" Bomb at your position at his apex.
For our troubles, we're awarded the "Clash" Bomb and Rush Coil.